AGENT Founder & CEO Kevin Meaney
MD of AGENT, Kevin Meaney, tackles our 60-second interview questions.
Q. What was your first job? My first job was when I was six back in 1986, when my younger brother and I set up shop in our parents’ garage to sell 10p ice pops that we made. They sold well back in the ’80s, but I don’t think concentrated orange juice ice pops would do well in today’s market! The first real jobs I worked were during summers while I was at college. In the early 2000s, I worked construction in San Francisco, building an apartment block on the corner of Stanyan & Beulah beside the famous Haight Street. That’s where I learned the value of team work, working hard to make tight deadlines, and the importance of listening. Those were things that shaped me and benefited me when I started out in business. Q. What would you regard as your greatest achievement to date? Convincing my beautiful wife to marry me was my greatest achievement! I am also blessed to have two great kids, but in terms of business my greatest achievement to date would be creating and growing AGENT to what it is today. Q. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? Never give up. When I started the company in 2007, I met with a family friend and a successful businessman in Limerick, who told me that the first couple of years would be tough, but don’t ever give up. He was right. A decade later, AGENT now has a team of 20+ professionals and is the trusted digital partner for leading brands nationwide and internationally. Persistence is key. Q. If you could step into the shoes of one business person for the day, who would it be and why? I am in a fortunate position to call many great business leaders clients, but it would have to be Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. To start Amazon from his garage to become what is now the world’s largest online shopping retailer, is an incredible achievement. Q. In three words or less, how do you define success? Never give up. Q. How do you motivate yourself and your staff? Our clients motivate us here at AGENT. There is no better satisfaction than the positive feedback we get from our clients. When a client tells us that sales and engagement are up due to our digital campaigns, there’s no better feeling. Q. How do you relax? At the gym and, of course, hanging out with my two young kids. No matter how challenging your day has been, when the kids bring you a painting they made for you in school, it balances everything out. Q. What’s your motto? The harder you work, the luckier you get. Q. What are your aspirations for the future of your business? In the short term, our main focus is the UK. We will be growing our existing AGENT.media audience of UK entrepreneurs and business owners and delivering effective digital campaigns for more UK brands through AGENT’s digital department – AGENT Digital.
When a client tells us that sales and engagement are up due to our digital campaigns, there’s no better feeling
CHANGE AGENT Kevin Meaney is the CEO & Founder of AGENT, which incorporates a business and lifestyle website and an award-winning full-service digital marketing department. AGENT.media is a website for ‘Change Agents’: entrepreneurs, business owners and professionals driven by passion. The website aims to inform, inspire and educate readers with a diverse range of business and lifestyle content, from news and features to the websites trademark Workplace Wednesday galleries. The AGENT.media website has more than one million views per month, and currently, the majority of this readership is in the US and UK. There are close to one million followers across AGENT.media social media platforms. The company is focused on developing AGENT.media in the UK in the short term. Powering the AGENT brand is its digital division, AGENT Digital. Established in 2007, this full-service digital agency, based in Dublin and Limerick, has spent a decade perfecting its ethos: listen-strategise-deliver. AGENT Digital listen to clients’ goals; create strategies to achieve those goals; and deliver those strategies through their range of services, such as design, development, video marketing, and digital marketing, which includes search and social marketing. The AGENT Digital team are digital Change Agents — pushing the capabilities of digital to the limit, to deliver the best for their clients, which include multinationals, universities, institutes and SMEs, nationwide and internationally, including The Body Shop, Smurfit Kappa and RTÉ.
